Who is Little Brother? He's all those people you know, sort-of-know, or wish you didn't know: creepy, barely remembered high-school classmates; Machiavellian coworkers; your angry ex. But mostly you really don't know who Little Brother is, because Little Brother is anonymous. He or she is part of a sea of nameless faces: the anonymity-emboldened tough guy on a message board, or an auteur posting a sadistic video on YouTube, or an obsessive Twitter-stalker, or, sometimes, a malicious suburban mom hiding behind a hoax identity while taunting a teenager to suicide.

Inexorably, we seem to be drawn to a battle between two conflicting notions — and the winner of that battle may determine what kind of Internet we end up with. The voices advocating for increased privacy protections argue that our actions online should remain invisible — unless we give our express consent to be watched and tracked. But some of the most powerful voices on the Web are beginning to suggest that you should be held responsible for your online actions: that your anonymity on the Web is dangerous.

Speaking at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe this past month, Google's Schmidt opined that the rise of user-driven technology — and the dangers posed by those who would misuse it — required a new approach. "The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity," he said. "In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it."

And Schmidt is right — the same governments that are investigating Google's breaches of their citizens' privacy are also demanding that their citizens be accountable for their online identities in ways that must make the world's totalitarian regimes smile. That's the paradox: any measure that would allow Google to track the sources of a Chinese hacker attack would also enable to the Chinese government to track its own dissidents.

Even on our shores, a look at recent government action on privacy shows how confused the issue has become.

On the one hand, US lawmakers and the nation's top consumer-protection agency are so spooked by online marketing practices that they are threatening legislation if the industry doesn't begin to self-regulate. By doing so, they're affirming the public's right to retain its anonymity.

Earlier this year, the FTC began floating the idea of a no-track list, which would prevent advertisers from gathering information from a user's online behavior — much as the federal Do Not Call list restricts the practices of telemarketers. The ability of marketers to track you has shifted so quickly, and the information they can glean is so frighteningly accurate, that in July, Congress hauled a who's-who of the interwebs — including representatives from Google, Facebook, Apple, and AT&T — in front of the Senate Commerce Committee, threatening to push bills through both the House and the Senate if the industry didn't start explaining to consumers what information is being collected and how it's being used.

After the Senate hearings, Massachusetts senator John Kerry announced that he would draft legislation — to complement bills already introduced in the House — that would give people more control over how their information is collected and distributed online.

In your Facebook Facebook users have been notably vocal about their privacy concerns, and last week's blow-up over the change in the site's contract produced an outpouring of suspicion, recrimination, and protest.

The year in tech This year saw some tech wins (public information), some losses (privacy), and many more questions for the future of an increasingly wired world. (Example: Is anything secret anymore?) And there was the appearance of yet another grassroots David, and, as if a warning to future Davids, the epic collapse of a bloated Goliath.

Stop SOPA The dinosaurs of the entertainment world ( i.e. , Hollywood movie studios and national music companies) have joined with the Business Software Alliance (which represents tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, and Intel) to sponsor an insidious piece of legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Meme forecast for 2012 When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in 1976 — meaning "a piece of thought copied from person to person" — he probably didn't realize that, in time, the word would come to be synonymous with cat macros, various advice animals, and Rebecca Black.

Spose, radio star Who knew? The era of the radio hit isn't completely over. Maybe five times recently, someone's asked, "Dude, have you heard that Spose song?"

Will Beacon Hill be bullied into enacting a politically correct law? A case of high-school bullying in South Hadley ended in tragedy this past January when the alleged victim, a freshman girl, committed suicide. Now, ramped up by the outrage over the case, Massachusetts legislators are in danger of enacting a politically correct law that could have devastating effects on our free speech.

Aaarrgghh! There is Pirate news, and not just that Penelope Cruz will star in the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie as Blackbeard’s daughter. No, there is Portland Pirate news.

INSIDE THE TEDXDIRIGO CONFERENCE | September 14, 2011 I arrived at TEDxDirigo on September 10 feeling rather less than confident about the state of world. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 — and the awful decade that unspooled from that sky-blue morning — was on my mind.